‘The US Congress wants to further regulate sex by way of the internet, and most people’s modern sex lives interact with the internet.’
Photograph: Andrew Bret Wallis/Getty Images

Craigslist shut down its personals section entirely last week. This left me shaken – for what it portends about my own sexual history with Craiglist’s “M4M” personals, about the safety of sex workers, and about the growing surveillance of sexual freedoms in the US.

The reason for the shutdown? The US Congress had just passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (Fosta) and Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (Sesta) bills. Donald Trump seems likely to sign these anti-sex bills into law, even as the nation hears all about him allegedly getting spanked by adult film star Stormy Daniels.

As Craigslist explained on its site, Fosta seeks “to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully”. If any sex work happens on their site, Craigslist itself could be sued.

“We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking Craigslist personals offline,” the ever simple internet billboard wrote. “Hopefully we can bring them back some day. To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through Craigslist, we wish you every happiness!”

If you think none of this applies to you because you’re not queer or into kink or sex work, think again

That kind sentiment hit me hard. One frigid February night in 2007 – a few weeks after my mother had died, deep in the darkest winter of my life – I responded to a Craigslist ad in the “men seeking men” category. We met that night and had sex.

Afterwards, we talked a bit in that lovely post-orgasmic way gay men sometimes do, in that space of connection that Craigslist M4M has made possible for me to meet other gay men in the far reaches of the globe. He was a smart and delightful man. We didn’t live in the same city, but later when we did, we dated for several years. Except in very rare instances, shame and embarrassment kept me from ever telling anyone that I’d met this boyfriend in this way. But he became one of the great loves of my life and is still a dear friend.

‘It’s a tragedy other people won’t have the freedom to explore as I did in this way.’ Photograph: Tetra Images/Getty Images

It’s sad that no one else will get to meet their boyfriends or missed connections on Craigslist any more, but my sadness isn’t only about the loss of “respectable” connections. I mourn all the connections people had through Craigslist that were meaningful for them, including sex work.

Craiglist M4M was fundamental to exploring my budding sexuality, and I hooked up with guys through it in my 20s. I don’t have the kind of face or body that generated much interest on Match.com when I was in my 20s, and I still don’t have the right looks to generate any interest on Grindr or Tinder.

But sometimes, in the flirting exchange of emails generated by Craiglist ads, I found men to explore with – sometimes sexually, sometimes not. It’s a tragedy other people won’t have the freedom to explore as I did in this way.

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But stymying sexual acts like mine wasn’t even the primary intent of Sesta or Fosta. The major purpose of these bills is to conflate coerced sex tracking with willing sex work, as well as to better punish anyone who willingly engages in sex work (and any website that facilitates it). This is a particular economic assault on people who are queer, trans and/or formerly incarcerated who have been locked out of other forms of earning income.

As senior reporter at In Justice Today, Melissa Gira Grant has been writing for some time, these bills are opposed by survivors of sex trafficking and will put the lives of sex workers ever more at risk. The answer now is to make sex work legal and to facilitate ways it can be done more safely, not to drive it more underground.

More people should care about sex workers’ rights. But if you think none of this applies to you because you’re not queer or into kink or sex work, think again: the US Congress wants to further regulate sex by way of the internet, and most people’s modern sex lives interact with the internet.

Craigslist shut down its entire personal section because of the overreaching congressional desire to control sex work. And there’s no reason Congress couldn’t similarly intimidate Tinder or Grindr to remove you or shut down entirely as it has Craigslist – and then where would you be?

There has been worry that the #MeToo movement could lead to a sex panic. But the real sex panic is not due to feminism run amok, but due to the patriarchal, homophobic, transantagonistic, theocratic desire of the US Congress to control sex workers – and, by extension, to smother the sexual desires of any of us who don’t want to conform to their puritanical ways.